Listen to Your Body Talk

Looking back at what I said in yesterday’s post, I gave some serious thought as to the comment, ”I honestly do not feel a whole lot different than I previously have.”  Honestly, I have never been all that in touch with my body and its feedback.  My wife senses things in her system as if she were a cyborg.  She’ll eat a single pomegranate seed and exclaim, “I feel more energized” or maybe have something with white flour, like three pretzels, and go, “This stuff makes me tired anymore.”  I am exaggerating of course.  (So no worries honey.  The world won’t think you are weird.)  It’s just to illustrate a point.  The point is that I, and perhaps you too, was clueless when it came to listening to my body.

For years I dealt with constant aches and pains, fatigue, and post food orgy fogginess.  My feet would ache, but nothing too bad.  I have had back problems for years. You just push through those.  I would tire easy, but you go on with what needs to be done.  After having a big meal (sometimes big enough to feed a community full of Amish after a barn raising) I would practically be comatose.  A quick nap would fix that.  And I learned to live with it all.  It was part of everyday life.  I’d been heavy for so long, my get up and go hadn’t got up and left, it never arrived in the first place.  I let food beat me down to the point where I accepted feeling crappy.

This experience has given birth to a phenomenon within myself, that, until yesterday, I hadn’t been aware of.  I am indeed getting more in touch with this sagging sack of bones I have been dragging around for forty eight years.  My body has been talking to me and I am starting to hear it.  When I said that I didn’t feel much different, I was looking for new things to spring forth that would be exhilarating, like a whole body Viagra.  What I wasn’t looking for was the dissipation of old things, the lack of maladies that I have dealt with for so long that they had become almost invisible to me.  IDIOT!  The truth is that I really do feel better!  Feeling less bad is feeling better.  DUH!

In the last three weeks I have not had the fatigue I had experienced for so long.  Also, I have been long suffering from something called gustatory rhinitis*.  That is a fancy way of saying that my nose would run almost every time I ate.  Despite trying to be very aware of what the triggers were, the answer has been elusive. Now the old sneeze gun is functioning normally and my sinuses don’t revolt when having a meal.  Caffeine was affecting me greatly before I gave it up.  I spoke of that the other day when only 3 ounces of wrongly served coffee set me off.  I can live without it. 

 I see this all as a huge breakthrough.  The realization that I do not have to tolerate what I once resigned myself to be burdened with is quite liberating.  It helps free me of some of the power that food has held over me.  Letting food lull me into complacency over proactively feeling good is one of the nasty tricks the addiction has perpetrated on me.  On all obese people.  Well, not any more.  The moral of the story?  Listen to your body talk…body talk.

For those expecting more of the “How Did I Get Here?” series today, I thought this more important.  I’ll pick that up again on Friday.  Oh, and my proof reader is off at school tonight.  If you find punctuation or grammer problems...oops!

Cya tomorrow,

M

What I ate and how I exercised today:

Breakfast ~ Kashi Island Vanilla cereal, ½ a banana and ¼ cup blueberries w/vanilla almond milk

Lunch ~ ½ a tuna on whole wheat and a bowl of black bean soup. 1 small apple. You can eat healthy at Panera with the right choices.

Dinner ~ Creamy Brussels sprout soup followed by ½ a grapefruit for a dessert of sorts

Exercise ~ I had every intention of walking today but my back has different ideas.  It’s really bothering me today.  I am going to try again tomorrow.

*http://www.chiactivate.com/articles/allergic-rhinitis/gustatory-rhinitis.shtml